Star Trek: Voyager

"Q2"

Air date: 4/11/2001
Teleplay by Robert Doherty
Story by Kenneth Biller
Directed by LeVar Burton

Review by Jamahl Epsicokhan

"He worked so hard on that paper. The least you could've done was tell him you were proud of him."
"But I'm not."

— Janeway and Q

In brief: Yawn. Not nearly funny enough to make up for the woeful lack of imagination and utterly wrong-headed use of the Q.

I suppose we're supposed to laugh at the fact omnipotent beings are asking parental advice of Captain Janeway. Unfortunately, the joke isn't all that funny — nor is much of "Q2" in general — so if it's not a comedy it can only be a pretty lame excuse for a Q episode.

The best Q comedy was TNG's "Deja Q." That was a show with chemistry and wit ... and a premise that at least made Our Favorite Q (John de Lancie) into a human, such that he had no choice but to experience human behavior firsthand. But "Q2" — aside from its ripped-off "Deja Q"-like elements — is unfortunately the sequel to "The Q and the Grey" from four years back, an episode that went about as wrong as a Q story could. "Q2" only takes that wrongness further; omnipotence apparently means you have the ability to do anything physically, but have the intellect and ambitions of an American teenager.

Basically, the problem is that we have humans teaching lessons to the Q instead of the other way around — which is absurd and simply a waste of the Q as a story device. When you have beings who can do anything, why put them through the shenanigans of sitcom-level teenage rebellion? In TNG's "All Good Things..." Q was trying to help Picard understand larger issues about the nature of the universe. In Voyager's "Death Wish" we had a Q who wanted to die because knowing everything had rendered his existence pointless. Those were interesting, larger-thinking shows.

Now? We get High Concept 101: "A teenage Q." And Higher Concept 102: "Let's have John de Lancie's real-life son (Keegan de Lancie) play the part of Q's son!" Well, great. It's an okay starting point and I'm sure fun for all the actors, but there has to be a story here for it to be worth our time.

Alas, there's not much to be said for the story that is "Q2." It's featherweight at best, and the lessons rehashed here are straight from Chapter 1 of the Star Trek Human Lessons Textbook. I wish I could say there was anything here resembling Q-worthy thought on the writers' behalf, anything that could put it more in the vein of "All Good Things..." or "Death Wish," but there isn't. "Q2" is simply a gag show starring the Q, with their super-duper powers as the tools for the gimmicks. There's no evidence this show even wanted to be thoughtful; it's dumbed down by design.

Q arrives on Voyager to ask "Aunt Kathy" (an amusing title, I'll grant) to help him teach his out-of-control son (born as a result of "Q and the Grey") some responsibility. Why Q cannot do this himself is a question that, if answered, would reveal the entire foundation of the episode as the sham it is. Apparently being omnipotent doesn't afford you any parenting skills. (Omnipotence just isn't what it used to be.) If we're to accept the can-of-worms premise of an out-of-control Q, at least make it seem like there's some urgency.

Instead, the idea of an out-of-control teenage Q quickly paves the way to a series of routine comic gimmicks. Gimmicky Q hijinks are a hallmark of Q stories, even in good ones like "Death Wish," but without a story to eventually grab our attention they just tire here.

Gimmick #1: Turn engineering into a dance club. "It's a party," explains Q Jr., with beverage in hand. Is it non-alcoholic? I hope so, because he's most definitely underage and that would mean Voyager needs more competent bouncers. For that matter, a drunken Q could be dangerous: Alcohol and altering the space-time continuum don't mix. Janeway rolls her eyes here for what won't be the last time.

Gimmick #2: Make Seven nekkid. This looks like one of those things the studio must've loved when they heard about. I can almost picture the people who cut together the episode trailers smiling with glee: Here's an easy workday! Plus, it can be justified as plausible! What heterosexual teenage male wouldn't wanted to see Seven without clothes? Nothing like a little realism in your Trek. Of course, Seven is too superior to be embarrassed or do any Janeway-style eye-rolling, so she simply uses the ignore-the-pest tactic.

Gimmick #3: War games. Q Jr. starts a war between two societies simply to watch their ships shoot at one another on the viewscreen. Somebody needs to go out and buy this kid a PlayStation or a DVD of Star Wars (the latter of which I'm guessing might actually be available by the 24th century, but no promises).

Gimmick #4: Make Neelix mute. Hey, this is actually a pretty good idea. Q Jr. fuses Neelix's jaw shut and makes his vocal cords disappear. Poor Neelix — he had his lungs extracted way back in "Phage" and now he has his vocal cords taken away. There's no justice in the world. Or come to think of it, maybe there is.

Such zaniness is setup for the actual premise, which is that Q suspends all of Q Jr.'s powers, and gives his son one week to shape up under Janeway's tutelage. If he hasn't shown great improvement, the Q Continuum will transform the unruly brat into an amoeba. The lesson: Actions Have Consequences, especially when your actions can rearrange entire worlds. I'd just like to know why Q can't conjure up some sense for this kid when he has the power to transform him into an amoeba. For that matter, I'd like to know if the writers actually thought any of their "intellectually immature superbeing" plot was fresh, seeing as TOS did "Charlie X" roughly 35 years ago.

The middle passages of the show are bland moments of Janeway trying to whip this kid into shape with lay-down-the-law threat tactics and then lessons that double as Meaningful Dialog Scenes. Eventually we're watching as Q Jr. writes a paper on the Q Continuum, which is hopelessly inane; apparently the great Continuum really is too much for my feeble mind to comprehend ... or for television writers to do any justice.

Then we have Q Jr. stealing the Delta Flyer because he apparently didn't learn anything from all this. His excuse for theft and joyriding? Boredom. He goes flying through alien territory with unwilling partner-in-crime Icheb, opening fire on an alien ship when they try to detain him for trespassing. Icheb is injured, Q Jr. escapes and returns to Voyager where he gets the usual dressing-down by Janeway. Icheb lies dying, with Doc going on about how he needs to know more about the weapon in order to save Icheb's life. (Yes, in sci-fi you can treat someone who has been run down by a car as long as you know what make and model the car was.)

The final act is so underwhelming it plays more like a parody on humanism than a satisfying ending. Q Jr. decides to accept responsibility for his actions by returning to face the music at the hands of the aliens he shot at. But, surprise! The alien was actually Q, who engineered the encounter as a test to see if Q Jr. would own up to the consequences of his mischief. Icheb is really okay. Then we get a quick trial of Q Jr. by Continuum judges, who, after all this, find that Q Jr.'s actions don't indicate acceptable levels of progress.

My point is more along the lines of Q's complaint — that Janeway has turned Q Jr. into a human with Federation values and, well, what good is that for the Continuum? They're judging Q Jr. on an incident and actions that have about as much cosmic relevance as what I ate for breakfast this morning.

LeVar Burton, who has directed excellent episodes like "Timeless," is saddled with a banal script that thinks small when it should be thinking big. The closing scenes give us a trial and a guilty verdict only for it to be reversed with a bunch of Q's off-screen (non)arguments. What, if anything, is all of this saying? It's clunky and abrupt along the narrative line.

My, how the Q have fallen. Amazingly, it would seem Voyager has managed to bastardize the Q even worse than the Borg. Who could've guessed that the beings who put humanity on trial back in the TNG days would be reduced to the sort of family sitcom where a son whines to his father about being too pressured about living up to expectations? Let's be real here: Do we want to see the Q as a metaphor for emotionally abandoned teenagers and/or fathers?

I'd have told the kid: Hey, you're omnipotent. With your talents I'll be damned if I'm going to let you end up working at Burger King. Stop screwing around and put that galaxy back where it belongs.

Next week: Doc's unauthorized Voyager biography. Some names have been changed to protect the guilty.

I loved Q on TNG but I think all his appearances on Voyager (and the one on
DS9) were terrible. He's always some kind of male chauvanistic pig and it
just goes downhill from there. Ugh. In this ep especially, he looks
tired, old, bloated and bored, just like his character at this point.

I actually enjoyed his DS9 appearance basically because of his nice
interactions with the DS9 gang.
However, his Voyager appearances made him basically a copy of that uncle on
Bewitched, unlike the character he established on TNG, which was much more
complex & interesting.

What happened to Q Jr's "technology" trick that opened a rift directly to
such-and-such a place? Why couldn't Voyager use the logs from the Delta
Flyer to do the same thing and take themselves home? Why, further, does
this omnipotent, lazy Q know more about their technology than they do even
when he "won't stoop to use it" and doesn't seem to have any other relevant
knowledge?

Q is the archetypal Loki, the trickster. At least he was used properly in
this vein in TNG, constantly tormenting humanity, and daring them to go
beyond their limits, and them punching them in the nose when they would do
so.
His one appearance on DS9 was totally lame, and a stunt, I suspect, on the
part of the DS9 production staff to net curious TNG viewers during DS9's
first season.
His appearances on VOY were absolutely egregious, and serve only to
diminish the interesting aspects that his character originally conveyed.
Bah. Humbug.

I have now seen all of Q's appearances on Voyager. I have not seen his DS9
appearance yet so cannot comment on it. I enjoyed "Death Wish", Q's first
appearance on Voyager, and I also enjoyed (and I may come under fire for
this, but everyone's entitled to an opinion) the Q and the Grey, but I
thought this episode was just a lame excuse to shoehorn Q into Voyager at
the last minute. Did he really need to come back after his last appearance?

Guess I'm the odd one out, I kind of enjoyed it. It wasn't "what could've
been" but after 7 seasons of Voyager I think I've accepted it for what it
is because it was never going to live up to its potential.

So expectations of un-Voyager-y things cast aside, I found it to be fun and
light hearted. I especially liked the replicator saying "make it
yourself!", referring to Neelix as the "pet Talaxian" and acknowledging how
annoying his character is, in this case by sealing his mouth :). (poor guy,
his heart is in the right place. But he IS annoying)

Not an ideal end to Q (seeing as there were no more 24th century Trek
series and John de Lancie was already looking a bit old for the part of an
immortal) but I didn't find it offensive. 2-2.5.

Can we retroactively rename this series, "Star Trek: Unused Potential"?

First, Voyager pissed away it's initial premises. The Starfleet/Maquis
conflict amounted to next to nothing, and the Kazon years -- which I think
were actually the series' best -- were too ham-fisted and not consequential
enough.

When it was evident things weren't working, Bernman and the gang brought in
Q for one of the series' best episodes ('Death Wish'). And, honestly, I
thought the 'Q and the Grey' was better than Jammer and others did.

But THIS episode on the heels of that one -- plus the watering down of the
Borg and even an episode that totally neutered the Klingons -- showed that
Voyager didn't just waste its own potential. It wasted the potential it
inherited from TNG.

DS9 wasn't a perfect series, but at least it made its own storylines and
premises. Voyager tried that, failed and then corrupted two big parts of
the TNG legacy.

TNG Q is more daunting and complex but at the same time Loki-like. VOY in
this ep is all Loki-like. Either way the episode was very funny to my
husband who is NOT a trekkie and got him interested in Trek a lot more.
Previously all his interest is making fun of sisko's and janeway's voice,
and poking fun about how reversing the polarity and recalibrations saves
the day (he thinks the writers of VOY are lazy that they can't imagine a
new science-talk and just kept repeating themselves). Either way it's
interesting how non-trekkies look at this ST world. Q had so much potential
to bring in more fans if done right -I wished TNG made 1 movie regarding Q.

I agree with all the criticism about the potential of Q being just pissed
away (my limited human brain can't imagine what an immortal omnipotent
being would actually do, since they have probably already done everything)
but ... I did like the actor playing the charming little sociopath (Q2), a
true chip off the old block (Q), and what a hoot it is to discover that the
two are actually father and son! Light frothy fun, so long as you skim
along the surface and don't try to think more deeply about it.

A decent, entertaining effort even if it is apparent that Q stories deserve
to amount to a lot more.

Part of what makes it forgivable is that there are plenty of smirk inducing
gags and all of the actors involved make much more mileage out of the
material than there really should be. Q Junior could have easily descended
into Jar Jar Binks territory, but thanks to the actor portraying him; he's
actually amusing, quirky and has a certain charm. It must be difficult to
nail a role were you must be irritating to every character yet loveable to
the audience.

A few instances did hold it back. Even for a story that's meant to be
light-hearted, some gags just didn't work and despite what the writers
think; we don't want Seven reduced to shameless bait for adolescent male
viewers. Plus some of Qs' human lessons were redundant. Making him write
essays was dull and useless, as the episode proved a few Acts later.

In the end I did hope for but I laughed more than I sighed, so it gets a
moderately enjoyable 2.5 stars.

Even though I think Janeway is an idiot in most of them, she wasn't half
bad here. I could be biased though, I love any episode of any Trek that has
Q. lol He's my favorite guest star of all time. The kid who plays his son,
is actually his son in real life too, so that was pretty awesome as well. -
pepsiadikt

Wow, I'm surprised this one is so hated. It's definitely not my favorite,
but I didn't find it offensive (except for the female sexploitation
moments). I didn't like Death Wish (moral objections), and thought Q and
the Grey was a little boring, so I guess this one would be the best Voyager
Q episode in my book. Once again I agree with azcats.

I think the reason I found endearing is that I'm a parent, and so I could
relate to a lot of the parenting plotline. I didn't take it as a grand Q
Continuum story, but rather a metaphor for human parenting. A lot of the
time that's what Star Trek is – a metaphor for our own times.

Q was originally a brilliant character. His chemistry with Picard was
excellent, and he was played to perfection. But then, towards the end of
Generation and for the entirety of Voyager, the character was destroyed by
brain dead and simplistic writing.

Besides the fact that the Voyager writers didn't seem to get what made Q a
great character in TNG, Keegan de Lancie's terrible acting didn't do this
episode any favors. And ha ha, sexual assault played as a joke? Classy
stuff.

This episode almost made me puke. In fact, give me a moment and I’ll be
right back…

Zero Stars – Stop destroying our favourite characters!!! I personally
love Q episodes. Almost every week, the writers try to piss us off in some
way. My only guess at this point, is that the writers for Voyager are
actually Star Wars fans, who hate Star Trek. There’s always been a bit of
rivalry between those who like Star Wars, and those who like Star Trek.
They infiltrated us. Get ‘em.

When Q said "If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times. Don't
provoke the Borg!!!", I could actually sense his fear. What the hell? Even
Janeway isn't afraid of the Borg. She willingly chooses to get assimilated,
she raids Borg cubes, etc... Voyager has now castrated the Q. Can it
get any worse?

DS9’s Q appearance was OK. It reminded me of “Encounter at Farpoint”,
as it was another Alien that was being held captive. Again, they were being
tested, to see if they would figure it out in time, and set the alien free.
It wasn’t as good as “Encounter at Farpoint”, but they didn’t
change the Q character like in this sack of crap.

As Q’s favour to Janeway, he should have left Neelix mute. Q could have
just winked at Janeway, said “You’re Welcome”, then snapped his
fingers and disappeared.

Just desperate. Even as someone who has only rarely enjoyed a Q episode,
this is a new low. I think that what gets my back up most is that Junior
takes on all of Q's most irritating traits, magnifies them by 100, and
makes a character unlovable enough that his conversion matters not a jot.
It also doesn't help that the conversion is so jarring, with a wildly
swinging tone, and that it follows right out of the Sesame St trite lesson
school.

I've said before that Q worked best as a vehicle for something else in my
mind, such as introducing the Borg in Q Who. This is the other extreme, a Q
episode that seeks nothing but to introduce a bigger, badder Q for nothing
more than its own sake. "Can I help you, kitchen rat?" indeed. 1 star.

Yeesh. When they decided to make a sequel to the not so great Demon, they
took that contrived, uh, contrivance and used it to make a unique and
interesting episode. And when they decided to make a sequel to the awful Q
and the Grey, they took that bad concept and doubled down on it, creating
this mess.

For starters, the episode doubled down on the absurdity of Qs acting like
humans. Remember, Q had absolutely no experience with being a human in
Deja Q, despite appearing like them and knowing all about them. He openly
admitted he would have appeared as a woman if he had realized before it
could have distracted Picard. So why, pray tell, is little q acting like a
horny fifteen year old? Why on earth would he care about techno-music and
what any alien girls look like? Why would he want to party or see Seven
naked? He wouldn't. But I guess the writers think we like this kind of
juvenile humor. Well, I certainly don't. And even if others do, it isn't
worth butchering the Q for it.

V mentioned that her husband, not a fan of Star Trek, liked the show.
Well, sorry, but that's not a good justification of it. Part of the joy of
a continuing franchise is the word "continuing", or continuity. We like
seeing characters and concepts and cultures developing out over time, and
seeing those characters and concepts and cultures in a new light. But it
requires those characters and concepts and cultures to show a connection to
what came in the past. Sure, it may be possible to create a good comedy
with a bumbling, incompetent legendary king in a fantasy world. But if it
was Aragorn, and an official sequel to Lord of the Rings? It'd be a slap
in the face of all the fans who became emotionally connected to him in the
far more serious LOTR. It doesn't fit the setting. Any quality in the
book would be offset by the massive disconnect it would have with the
intended audience.

Same here with this farce of a Q. Now, Trek is huge, and things have
definitely been retconned at times, and for good reason. I don't mind that
the Trill in The Host are nothing like the Dax family, because some things
that work in a one-off episode wouldn't work in a deeper exploration. I
don't mind that the Ferengi were retconned after their dismal initial
showings. But Q was beloved. Q was at the beginning and end of TNG. Q
was a well developed concept by this point. Why are we throwing away some
excellent concepts for a cheap farce and juvenile jokes? Who thought this
would be a good idea?

Except that it was prevalent in all three Voyager Q shows. The stupid
flirting with Janeway. This teenage PG-rated rebel here. Why??? If you
wanted to have a story about a magical being who didn't know what it was
like to be a parent, create a new magical being. Sure, it would probably
be too TOS-like and still probably be dumb, but at least you aren't
embarrassing a beloved actor and beloved character.

Ugh, but anyway, it wasn't just that, even if it is the most egregious. Q
tells Janeway to teach q how to be a Q, without actually letting her know
what that entails. He still thinks humans are stupid; shouldn't he see the
obvious contradiction in that? And so Janeway has q work on a term paper
and learn how to be a human? OK, in fairness, Q gave her no direction on
what to do, but gave her a very strict deadline. I'm pretty sure a term
paper isn't going to impress anyone. I'm pretty sure any training program
has more value than that...

Meanwhile, q apparently doesn't know how to write a paper, doesn't know how
to pilot a ship, but does know how to reprogram holodecks and open random
wormholes (and hey, shouldn't Kim or Seven be able to reverse engineer
whatever he did based on the Delta Flyer's logs?). Just what constitutes
knowledge that is beneath value for a Q and what doesn't? The answer is
apparently whatever the plot requires. Which is definitely a sign of a
problem in the plot...

Oh, and "Don't provoke the Borg!"? Hey, Q, what did you do back in Q Who?
Oh, right, provoked the Borg. Guess he belongs to the "do as I say, not as
I do" school of parenting.

As for the ending, and it's obvious parallels to Deja Q, well, I'm of two
minds on that. On the one hand, it kinda makes sense that Q would set that
scenario up. After all, it was what got HIM reinstituted into the Q
Continuum, so maybe it should work for q as well. So logically, I can see
the reasoning. But the execution just fell flat. Besides the obvious
retread and the obviousness that the alien was Q (c'mon, the coincidences
of everything were way too high), the emotional connection just wasn't
there. That said, I did like the scene where Q callously refused to save
Icheb. One of the very few scenes where he actually felt like the
character he really was.

This was an episode we really didn't need, and wasn't worth it even if we
did. Poor Q, he deserved much better than this.

This really has nothing to do with this episode except that I am rewatching
some of Voyager and this episode reminded me of my story. . .

I got to meet John deLancie! AND I made him chuckle.

He's VERY tall, AND very handsome, which actually surprised me, because I
have never found Q attractive in the least. His wife is BEAUTIFUL, and I
seriously kicked myself for not googling before the event so I would have
known that she is the actress who played the female voice of Reva in "Loud
as a Whisper." Just like in that episode, her voice is lovely. She was
also very nice--I was chatting with her for a while without realizing until
later who she was.

So anyway, this was at a dinner during the Reason Rally, and John deLancie
was seated right behind me. After dinner, people got up and began mixing
and chatting, and the organizer requested over the microphone that all the
"main stage speakers come to the annex room for a group photo." John
apparently didn't hear, because he turned to me and asked what they had
said. I repeated it, then said, "I thought you were supposed to be
omniscient!"

He chuckled and replied, "Oh, I've NEVER heard that one before!" But he
said it with a smile and wink, so I think it was okay. I at least
refrained from falling at his feet in admiration, so it worked out well.
:-)

Maybe I'm just a terrible person, but I really liked this episode the first
time I saw it and I still like it. I haven't seen a Q episode I didn't like
except the one in TNG where that girl gives away her Q powers rather than
saying thank you and then just not using them.